Science Friday - Rhesus Monkey Cloned With Modified Approach Has Survived Into Adulthood

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

This week, a research team in China reported that it had successfully cloned a rhesus monkey, which has lived normally for over two years and reached maturity. It marks the first time that a rhesus monkey has been successfully cloned. Rhesus monkeys are used widely in medical research, making the advance potentially useful for medical trials.Cloning of primates in general has been difficult. Six years ago researchers cloned long-tailed macaques using the technique originally used for Dolly the cloned sheep. But an attempt to use that approach to clone a rhesus was unsuccessful, producing an animal that died after 12 hours. In the new work, the research team identified flaws in placental cells of previous cloned embryos. To address those flaws, they replaced the outer trophoblast cells from a developing cloned embryo with ones from an embryo created through an in-vitro fertilization technique—essentially providing cells that would develop into a normal placenta for the cloned embryo.Tim Revell of New Scientist joins Ira to talk about the work and its implications. They’ll also discuss other stories from the week in science, including the discovery of lots of ice buried under Mars’ equator, an AI that’s good at solving high school math challenges, and the discovery of four new species of octopus.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

We've got lots of ice buried under the Martian equator, an AI that's good at solving high school geometry challenges, and a Japanese moonlander called Slim, all in the Science Friday News Roundup. It's Friday, January 19th, also known officially as Science Friday. I'm SciFry producer Kathleen Davis. Lots of stories this week, but first up, a research team in China reported that it has used a new technique to success. clone a Rhesus monkey. That clone, named Retro, has now lived for over two years and reached maturity. This is the first time that a Rhesus monkey has been successfully cloned. The species is used widely in medical research, making the advance potentially useful for medical trials. Tim Revel of New Scientist joins Ira to talk about the work and its implications. Welcome back, Tim. Thanks for having me. Nice to have you. Okay, tell us about this clone monkey.

What's going on here? Yeah, so there have been many attempts to clone resus monkeys over the years, but normally they result in very early deaths. And retro appears to be the first clone recus monkey that is completely healthy. It was actually born in July 2020, but we're just hearing about him now. So he's actually more than three. And the thing with this clone is that it's slightly different cloning to the normal type of cloning you'd think of in terms of like Dolly the sheep from the 1990s.

Right. And that's that rather than using adult cells, fetal cells, the key thing at the beginning. So that means you couldn't use this technique to just take some cells from you and create a second, Ira. Instead, who would want that to begin with? Instead, you would have had to imagine that right at the beginning of your life. And what did that solve? Was there a specific problem that that solved? Yeah, the difficult thing, particularly with primates and with humans, if we're ever to try to clone them, is that throughout your life, you get lots of these genetic markers that change how your DNA behaves. And they work well for, as you're older.

But they're not the right markers for if you want to create a completely new you from the beginning. And so by taking fetal cells rather than adult sales, it doesn't have any of those genetic markers on them. And therefore, you can create a clone that way. Very clever. Yeah, very clever indeed. But is this going to lead to more cloned primates, do you think? I think it's possible that this method might be used for one specific use case. And that's for if you want to have a scientific study where you have lots of primates.

that have all got the exact same genetics and you wanted to test different medications on them. But primate research is very controversial and so is cloning. And so I don't think we're going to see a quick explosion. Or people. Or people. I honestly think that like it was so difficult to produce this racist monkey that it seems unlikely to me like it's illegal in most countries to try a human clone. As far as we know, nobody's actually tried that.

Okay. Let's move on to news as we speak about a Japanese moonland. called Slim. What is this? Yeah, so this is an amazing moon lander. Slim stands for smart lander for investigating the moon. And since December, it's been orbiting the moon. And within the last few hours, it actually touched down on the moon. And the thing with Slim is that it was built to test this technology called smart eyes,

which is all about how accurately could we possibly land on the moon. and so normally the area you're looking to land is tens of kilometers one made. But the hope, and this is still currently being confirmed as we speak by the Japanese Space Agency, the hope was that it would be able to land in an area as small as 100 meters. Wow. Yeah, really, way better than anything else. They have some proprietary method of doing? It's just like the technology that exists today.

So things like artificial intelligence. So as it descends, it's using image recognition to spot craters and to course correct automatically as it goes down. That is really cool. It's really amazing. So even just landing has been, is a really good achievement. The thing that is a slight disappointment is it seems that the lander's solar panels aren't working. And if that's the case, it's only got a few hours battery life from now. So Jaxa, the Japanese Space Agency, they're currently rushing to try to fix it, but also you make the most of the few hours that they might have.

I get it. Okay, let's move on to a story that you have about human life expectancy. A gap between men and women? Yeah, this is a really cool study that's looked at mortality data from 194 countries over a 20-year period. And it's about how life expectancy is changing and how it's changing between men and women. So over that 20-year period, nearly every country life expectancy has increased. And throughout that period, also the gap between how long men and women has also decreased. So typically women live a little bit longer than men.

And in the richest countries that they grouped together in this research, that gap has been closing a small amount from 4.85 years at the beginning of the study to 4.77 at the end, which is only small. But the team predict that by 2030 the gap will be down to 3.4 years. That's amazing. But I know that, yeah. Well, why? Good question, yeah. So part of the reason is down to, so life expectancy is generally increased because medicine has improved. And one of the areas where we are seeing quite a big impact is on diseases such as those related to smoking and alcohol, both the medicine, the sort of treatments available, but also awareness campaigns. And those typically hit men harder. More men were affected. And so as that's reduced, the gap has decreased.

And this is a global thing. Yes, it's a global thing. Yeah, there are only a handful of countries where this pattern is not what we're seeing. Looking at numbers, speaking of numbers, you have a story about AI doing trick. math problems. I could have used that years. Yeah, couldn't. Me too. I really love this story. This one's about, you've probably heard of the International Mathematical Olympiad. Oh yeah. Yeah, it's basically the like the big math competition for high schoolers and it pits the sort of mathematical wits against each other. And traditionally AI is terrible at mathematics. So GPT4, for example, open AI's

really famous AI score zero on math Olympiad questions. It just can't do them. And even specialized AI's built to try and solve this problem have not been particularly good at it. Well, now what's changed is that Google DeepMind have had a go, and they've built this AI called Alpha Geometry. And on a test of 30 Olympiad questions, it scored 25. And by comparison, an Olympiad gold medalist, which is the best of the best, is expected to score about 25.9. So it's hot on the heels of the smartest high score math Olympiads. Yeah, I remember doing geometry. I really liked it because you had to prove, of things. And that's what they must have had to do, right? Yeah. The AI. So that's exactly right. And one of the ways that they improved their

AI to make it possible is that it's actually built in two parts. The first part is a bit like chat GP. It's chat GPT. It's good on vagueness and language and understanding the problem, but it's not the one that's allowed to solve the problems. Instead, it feeds it to another part of the AI that has to use rigorous mathematical logic, which is what gets it to an actual proof and an answer rather than the sort of just the sort of fake answers that you tend to get with ChachyPT. Imagine the homework it had to do. Yeah.

It was trained on hundreds of millions. Oh, is that right? Hundreds of millions, yeah. So it did a lot of homework before it came good enough. Better it than me. Let's move off the planet for a minute. And there's a mysterious patch on Mars. I mean, there's always something mysterious on Mars.

But this appears to be a giant lump of ice. Yeah, it's amazing. So it's this huge deposit around the equator of Mars called the Meducy Fossi Formation. And we've known about this for 15, 20 years, but not been exactly sure what it is. It turns out now, according to new data, that it's actually this patch of water ice. And there's so much water ice there that if it melted, it could cover the entire surface of Mars in six and a half feet deep water. I'm just trying to absorb that. So it's a giant patch of ice that if it melts, wow.

Yeah, it's like a ring. That's unbelievable. It's amazing. And I'm just picturing that amazing planet-wide swimming pool. Yeah, it'd give a very different vibe to the red planet if it was actually a blue planet, wouldn't it? So it must tell us something about past that this water came from somewhere, right? Yeah, so under the current conditions on Mars would not allow this sort of water to form. So instead, the suggestion is perhaps, you know, we know that Mars over its lifetime has tilted many times and swung back and form.

and that perhaps in its past, this water ice formed when the equator was pointing further away from the sun. Let's stay because it is Science Friday. In space news, which we love, there's some black hole news this week. Yeah, the James Webb Space Telescope, or the James Welley Space Telly, as my space colleague likes to call it. I like that. Yeah, it's spotted this black hole that is the oldest and most distant black hole we've ever seen. The black hole is six million times as massive as the sun. And it's located. in this galaxy named GNZ11, and that's about 13.4 billion light years away. But the light coming from that galaxy is just 400 million years after the Big Bang. So it's really, really young.

Wow, that's just like it's in its infancy, right? Right after it form. Does it tell us anything about black holes, or is it just the oldest one? Yeah, it's the oldest one, but it's very strange for a black hole to be that big, that early in the universe's history. So it suggests that there might be something wrong with our understanding of how black holes form. You think? We keep hearing these stories about black holes being mysterious.

Well, our laws of physics are not up to snuff anyway. Yeah, they're not up to snuff at all. Let's talk about global warming. Is turning ibex nocturnal? Is that right? That's correct, yeah. So this is specifically alpine ibex in the European Alps. And as global temperatures warm up, the animals that are most affected by that tend to be the ones that are in colder climate, such as like these alpine ibex.

And a team looked at their patterns of behaviour over a 15 year period and found that the ibex are when it's hotter during the day, that they become much more active at night. But the thing with that is that at night, wolves are much more active too. And they're particularly partial to the taste of an alpine ibex. Oh, that's not good news for them. Not good news for them. No. Finally, we have this story that's both materials and topology, the smallest knot. Yeah, smallest and tightest.

How small are we talking about? Just 54 atoms form this knot. And it's formed into a sort of trefoil knot shape, so sort of three intersecting parts. And yeah, it's pretty amazing. It's partly made of gold, and it was almost made serendipitously because it was just mixing a certain atoms together resulted in this knot. And so it formed spontaneously when they mix the atoms together? Yeah, that's right. So they

mixed together a liquid containing gold atoms linked by carbon rings and then phosphorus atoms linked by a different assortment of carbon rings. And then they don't know why it forms, but it does. And then they ended up with this amazing knot. And they were trying to do something else, probably. Well, they were hoping to form knots. The thing is they just don't know why they form this way. But the hope is that if they keep doing this, eventually we might figure out why the knots form. And that could help us to make more interesting materials, but also to better understand biology as proteins often form these strange types of knots.

Or not. Yeah, or not. Thank you very much, Timothy. It's great stuff. Thanks for having me. Timothy Revel, Deputy U.S. Editor at New Scientist based in New York. I understand you're heading back to London shortly. You're going to be leaving us. Yeah, in March I will be back in the UK. Well, good luck to you.

And thank you for all the work you've been doing with us. We'll still be in touch. Yeah, I hope so. I can dial in from there. And that's it for today. A lot of folks help make the show happen, including Annie Niro, Emma Gomez, Charles Bergquist, Daniel Johnson.

And many more. Next time, we'll dive deep into the applications of AI in medicine, from chatbots assisting with diagnosis, to systems that can analyze your x-ray and MRI scale. scans. I'm Kathleen Davis. Thanks for listening and have a great weekend.